Personal Finance Management: Goodbye Mint, Hello Lunch Money

On March 23rd, Intuit shut down Mint, its personal finance management product. I’d relied on Mint for over a decade for budgeting and understanding my spending habits. I now needed a replacement as Intuit’s replacement for Mint (Credit Karma) didn’t seem to have all the necessary features.

While looking at popular recommendations like Monarch Money, Quicken Simplifi, Tiller (using spreadsheet templates), I came across Lunch Money. After a month of trialing these products and getting to know their features, I chose to go with Lunch Money based on the UI design, user experience, learning curve, and support.

It offers several important features in addition to automatically importing bank transactions.

• Transaction categorization - Ability to assign, review and change categories for transactions.

• Categories and Tags - Allows customization of categories and category groups. Additionally, transactions can be associated with custom tags.

• Rules -? Rules can be defined to have automated categorization and tagging.

• Recurring transactions - Shows recurring payments in a separate view.

• Query tool - A powerful feature to locate any transaction using date range, category, account etc.

• Other features - There’s more, like Budgeting, Analytics, Multi-currency support, and a developer API.
• Pricing flexibility - Offers a pay-as-you-choose annual pricing between $40 to $150.

While reading more about Lunch Money, I was awed to find out that the entire product was built and maintained by a single developer, Jennifer Yip . She has been working on this since 2019 and covered the journey of building the app on her blog. The tech stack (interesting read with 30+ components involved), feature requests and roadmap are also publicly available online. She has prepared an exhaustive knowledge base documentation and provides support over email and Discord. For users migrating from Mint, the developer built a historical transaction migration tool.

The transition to Lunch Money has been quite rewarding though I took a while revisiting the categories and rules. Every aspect of the product seems to be well-thought out and the desktop screen space is efficiently utilized. The passion of the developer is evident when using the application and I wanted to spread the word out. For me, this is an excellent successor to Mint.

For anyone interested in learning more about my experience with Lunch Money, please feel free to reach out.

Link - https://lunchmoney.app/

Edit - Links added again